Bruce Willis is a surprising fresh face – if one can call him that – in the new comedy by Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums). Otherwise, it’s exactly what you’d expect – but better.

Willis plays a lonely cop on the hunt for two precocious 12-year-old runaways. The girl (Kara Hayward) is a depressed, gangly legged bookworm who looks at the world through binoculars because ‘it helps me see things clearer, even if they’re not far away’. The boy (Jared Gilman) is a speccy orphan Scout whose first instinct on getting the girl’s clothes off is to paint a watercolour portrait of her. Both are loners, who, in clinging together, finally find intimacy and a home.

Set in 1965, this time Anderson’s self-contained kingdom isn’t a foxhole (Fantastic Mr Fox), a train (The Darjeeling Limited) or a submarine (The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou) but a small island off the coast of New England. Its meticulously retro look is so fetishistically neat you itch to run screaming through it armed with a gunk gun, yet for once the over-styling doesn’t stifle the characters. That’s partly due to a terrific ensemble of indie icons including Bill Murray (natch), Frances McDormand and Edward Norton but also due to the refreshing, undisguisably unformed nature of his young, unknown leads.

The biggest gripe about Anderson’s films is that they are just too Wes Anderson-y. Moonrise Kingdom certainly is. But if your affection for his deadpan, dysfunctional family comedies has drifted of late, this sweet, simple first-love story will make you fall for their studied, oddball charms all over again.